Calculating Macronutrient / Calorie Percentages

Calculating Macronutrient / Calorie Percentages

I will start off by saying this article is mostly geared towards beginners learning how to calculate their macronutrient / calorie percentages on a diet. I myself remember a while back when I was first getting into bodybuilding, that I did not know how to calculate anything, what the terms people were using meant, and so on. So, this article is meant to briefly go over some of the terms used and how to carry out the different calculations used in creating a diet.

Whats your Macros?

When the word 'macronutrient' is used it refers to either carbohydrate, protein, or fat. Oftentimes it is asked 'whats your macro split?' or some variation of that phrase, meaning what are your protein/carb/fat tallies. Oftentimes the response will be a split or some sort, 35/35/30, 40/20/20 and so on. These macro splits are usually designated as Protein to Carb to Fat splits, so if a person is saying 35/35/30 they mean they are getting their total daily calories as 35% from protein, 35% from carbs, and 30% from fat.

Macro Split

35 / 35 / 30
Protein / Carbohydrate / Fat
P / C / F

35% from Protein
35% from Carbohydrate
30% from Fats

These percentages are from total daily calories, so for the entire day, they will get 35% of their calories from protein and carbs, and 30% of them from fats.

From my article on how to calculate maintainance calories, you should know how to calculate your maintainance, cutting, or bulking calories. Now we can look at taking these macro percentages and calculate how much we should be eating in terms of calories and grams of each macro.

Say a person has a cutting calorie level of 2500 calories daily

They want to use a 35/35/30 split, so we must calculate how many calories each that is first:

And you can divide by whichever number of meals you want to eat daily, whether it be 5, 6, 4, whatever.

So there we have it, you can now take any macro percentage and calculate how many total daily calories you should eat, how many calories per meal, and how many grams per meal each macro should be. Again, this article is mainly aimed towards beginners learning how to get these things calculated. If you have any questions feel free to ask.

The choice of appropriate macro split is really based upon your goals, whether you are bulking, cutting, or maintaining. For bulking, depending on your bodyfat / how well you tolerate carbs, you could do P/C/F 35/35/30 or 40/40/20, I prefer the former for most people. For cutting, I would do P/C/F 35/35/30 or lower carb end with 20% of total calories coming from carbs. Some tolerate low carbs well, some do not. Usually I try to start off with small dietary changed and work up, for example first eliminating all carbs except vegetables and fruits, then from there some vegetables and fruits, and from there no carbs except from very fibrous veggies / fruits. Tons and tons of ways to do it, its very individual.

Originally Posted by newguy2008

typo prob meant 40/40/20

how do you calculate the calories you need to cut/bulk/maintain?
btw awesome post!!!